Happy Birthday, Steam Workshop!

It’s been a year since the Steam Workshop first launched as a submission path for items in Team Fortress 2. Since that time, the Workshop has quickly grown to support many games with different models of player-created content and exposed many players to the world of modding along the way.

When the Workshop first launched last October, users could submit models such as hats and weapons for TF2, which would then be voted on by the community of Steam users. The Team Fortress team then selected the best of the best and shipped those in the Mann Co. in-game store, with authors getting a cut of the in-game sales.

A few months later, in February of this year, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched on the Workshop, allowing users to easily share and download mods made in the Skyrim Creation Kit. The Skyrim Workshop quickly grew and today hosts over 10,000 items, mods, quests, and entire new worlds.

In the following months, Portal 2 shipped with an incredibly easy to use level editor and Dota 2 shipped with a similar curation model as TF2. These were quickly followed by Sid Meier’s Civilization V, Total War: Shogun 2, and a growing collection of indie games.

Today, there are 16 shipped titles on the Steam Workshop, with many more currently preparing for launch and in various stages of private testing. There are almost 300,000 items, ranging between models, animations, maps & levels, scenarios, and even full games made in GameMaker Studio. Those items add up to over 55 million downloads. Workshop contributors for TF2 and Dota 2 combined have been paid millions of dollars for the items they’ve created now on sale. The Workshop is also regularly one of the most visited destinations in the Steam Community.

So, what’s next?

Valve has always been committed to supporting the modding community and content creators of all kinds, and many of us got our starts in this industry as modders. Some content creators in the Steam Workshop are already professional game developers, while many more are just starting out with a promising future in that direction. With that in mind, we have some exciting additions coming to the Steam Workshop in the coming months to better support content creators, modders, and the community in general.

Our goals are to:

Make sure that content creators have the tools they need to keep doing what they do best

Add more ways for content creators and customers to communicate

Enable a broader base of content creators, contributing to the community in a greater variety of ways and mediums

Look for more details in the near future as we work toward expanding the Workshop and releasing the next set of features.